Form in Adorno

Toward a More Adequate Reception of Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory": Configurational Form inAdorno's Aesthetic WritingsAuthor(s): Shierry Weber NicholsenSource: Cultural Critique, No. 18 (Spring, 1991), pp. 33-64Published by: University of Minnesota PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354094Accessed: 10/12/2009 08:24

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Toward a More Adequate Reception of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: Configurational Form in Adorno's Aesthetic Writings

Shierry Weber Nicholsen

In what is called philosophy of art, one or the other is usually missing-either the philosophy or the art.

-Friedrich Schlegel, intended by Adorno as the motto for his Aesthetic Theory

In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes. -Adorno, in "Beethoven's Late Style"

Adorno's Aesthetic Theory has had a slow and problematic reception in the United States, certainly a much more problematic

reception than his critical essays on music and literature.l There are many factors one might adduce in considering why this is so: the changing intellectual situation in the decades immediately following Aesthetic Theory's publication, the unfinished character of the book itself, the "late work" dynamics Adorno explored in Beethoven's work, and Christian Lenhardt's embattled translation of Aesthetic Theory, to name a few. Here, however, I will focus solely on a narrow issue, that of certain differences in textual form

? 1991 by Cultural Critique. 0882-4371 (Spring 1991). All rights reserved.

33

34 Shierry Weber Nicholsen

between Aesthetic Theory and the better-received essays on literature and music, which I will refer to as the critical-aesthetic essays, to distinguish them from essays on more narrowly philosophical or sociological topics. I will make a case for a subtle shift in form from the essays to Aesthetic Theory, a shift which, for all the obvious continuities in content and presentational form, causes the rela-

tionship between the aesthetic and the conceptual elements-the relationship between philosophy and art, if you will-to be re- structured in that late work, in a way that would require the reader to develop a qualitatively new structure of experience in order to grasp the work adequately. Hopefully my discussion of this narrower issue can provide a starting point for an examination of the broader and certainly more complex issue of form in Ador- no's writings as a whole, an exploration which would encompass, for instance, a comparison between Aesthetic Theory and Negative Dialectics, as well as a delineation of the range of larger formal structures within which Adorno practices his dialectical or con-

figurational method.2 Most work on Aesthetic Theory available in English has focused

on Adorno's theoretical constructs rather than on questions of form. A case in point is Wellmer's "Truth, Semblance, Reconcilia- tion: Adorno's Aesthetic Redemption of Modernity," which pro- poses to reconstruct Aesthetic Theory along Habermasian linguistic- pragmatic lines. Wellmer himself, however, an acute interpreter of Adorno's thought and work, points to the relevance of textual form in Adorno's aesthetic writings, and I will take his remarks as

my point of departure. Wellmer begins his essay by attesting to the differences in

reception between the critical-aesthetic essays and Aesthetic Theory, formulating the crux of the latter's difficulty as follows: "It is not its esoteric character that has hindered the reception of Aesthetic Theory. The problem lies rather in its systematic aspects: the aesthetics of negativity has revealed its rigid features: in Adorno's aporetic constructions something artificial has become visible" (90). Wellmer attempts to dissolve this rigidity by disentangling the various theoretical strands in Aesthetic Theory and then propos- ing a direction for reconstruction based on an alternative paradigm, an intersubjective-linguistic as opposed to a subject-object paradigm. This project distinguishes Wellmer from critics of Aes-

Adorno's Aesthetic Theory 35

thetic Theory who place Adorno's work on one side of a conceptual opposition such as that between an aesthetics of production and an aesthetics of reception. He discusses several critiques he con- siders to be partially correct and comments that they nevertheless "leave one with the feeling of a disproportion between the results of critique and its object: as though the real substance of Adorno's aesthetics had escaped the critics" (90). His own critique, in contrast, is based on Adorno's notion of art interpretation: the truth content of the work of art is historical, and certain of its moments will fall away in the course of history.

To use this approach is to acknowledge an aesthetic dimension in Adorno's writings. Wellmer comments, "The allusion to Ador- no's understanding of art interpretation is not merely meant as an

analogy: Adorno's texts on aesthetics have something of the work of art about them, and to this extent can neither be exhausted nor surpassed by interpretation and critique" (115). With this Wellmer introduces the conclusion of his essay, and he follows with two images for a revisioning of Adorno's text. The first retains his idea of distinguishing between separate moments in the text: "Interpre- tation and critique might well take on, with respect to these texts, the function of a magnifying glass. If one reads the texts with the help of a magnifying glass, it is possible that layers of meaning which to the naked eye blend into each other will now separate and

gain an independence from each other" (115). In the second im-

age, however, one that has justifiably intrigued readers and has been cited repeatedly, and which itself echoes an image used by Adorno and Benjamin, Wellmer shifts to an image of surface and depth: "The image of a stereoscope would be better still: it would here be a question of producing a three-dimensional picture that would reveal the latent depth of the texts. Through this kind of 'stereoscopic' reading of Adorno one will discover that his incom- parable capacity for penetrating experience philosophically has permitted him-even in the limited representational medium of a philosophical subject-object dialectic-to give expression to much that in fact resists representation in this medium" (115).

Wellmer's notion of a kind of reading that permits the depth below the surface to be seen, or penetrated by experience, found its complementary image in my own initial unreflected reading of Aesthetic Theory: whereas individual sentences in the book seem


striking and suggestive, when one reads any part of the book sequentially and at length, the text seems to present a vast surface over which an endlessly recurrent small-scale pattern plays, a surface somehow without depth. It is the dialectical movement from assertion to negation and from one conceptual opposition to another that produces this pattern, and the reader attempting to follow the recurrent movement across the endless surface becomes disoriented. This (strikingly Mallarmean) conjunction of Adorno's own image of the constellation with this image of surface and depth will prove to be the key in describing the form of Aesthetic Theory, and I will return to it in the final section of my essay.

Wellmer's concluding image emerges in the context of a statement about the relationship of experience, presumably aesthetic experience, to its philosophical presentation. It thus points to the crucial issue of the relationship between the conceptual presentation in Adorno's writings, the aesthetic dimension of his texts (their resemblances to works of art), and the reader's experience or understanding of them. It is by exploring this threefold relationship through an examination of some of Adorno's texts that I hope to account for some of the difficulties with the reception of Aesthetic Theory. In doing so, I will not use Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, as critics of Aesthetic Theory have tended to do, but Adorno's "The Essay as Form," his pro- grammatic presentation of the form of his own critical writings on geistige Gebilde, or cultural artifacts.

"The Essay as Form"

Adorno's characterization of the essay form is couched in terms of the image of a constellation or configuration.3 The following formulation is typical:

All of [the essay's] concepts are presentable in such a way that they support one another, that each one articulates itself ac- cording to the configuration it forms with the others. In the essay, discretely separated elements enter into a readable context: it erects no scaffolding, no edifice. Through their own movements the elements crystallize into a configuration. It is


a force field, just as under the essay's glance every intellectual artifact must transform itself into a force field. ("Essay" 161)

Adorno describes this configurational form by distinguishing it in a variety of ways from systematic discursive presentation. The essay, he says, provides neither definitions of concepts nor examples; instead, meanings are built up through the use of the concept in a variety of interrelated contexts, and neither exhaustive analysis nor deduction from first principles is practiced. Instead, the essay's substance emerges through the experience of a contingent subject with a specific object. In making this distinction between essay form and systematic discursive presentation, Ador- no has repeated recourse to comparisons between the configurational form of the essay and the works of art that are its typical subject matter. The essential claim is that while the essay, because of its conceptual character, is not a work of art, it nevertheless has something in common with the work of art: the essay "distin-

guishes itself from art through its conceptual character and its claim to truth free from aesthetic semblance," and yet "it is scarcely possible to speak of the aesthetic unaesthetically, without be- coming narrow-minded and a priori losing touch with the aesthetic object" (152-53).

What might it mean to speak of the aesthetic aesthetically? Adorno offers a range of formulations on the essay's resemblance to art: if the essay is a configuration or constellation of conceptual moments in tension with one another, those moments are those of the cultural artifact with which the essay is concerned; the constellation is a reconstruction of the "conceptual membra disjecta" of the cultural object (169). But the work of art itself, as Adorno conceives it, is a construct of moments in tension with one another. Thus the essay has affinities with the visual image as a "constructed juxtaposition of elements," its static, image-like aspect being the product of tension at a standstill (170). And insofar as the links between individual elements are not relationships of deduction, enumeration, or exemplification, as in systematic discursive presentation, the essay also "verges on the logic of music, the stringent and yet aconceptual art of transition" (169). Further, the essay's very enterprise, that of making an interpretation in linguistic and conceptual terms of something that is a cultural


artifact and thus aconceptual, resembles the difficult task of artistic form, which must hold together moments both nonidentical and in tension with one another: "the consciousness of the non- identity between the presentation and the presented material forces the form to make unlimited efforts. In that respect alone the essay resembles art" (165). Finally, the reconstructive activity that produces the essay's configuration is the conceptual effort of the experiencing subject, an effort of spontaneity directed toward the specific cultural artifact in question. In the essay, that activity is not extrapolated to systematic theorizing but rather remains oriented to the compatibility of interpretation and object. The essay, Adorno says in a Kantian formulation, "thereby acquires an aesthetic autonomy" (153).

In Adorno's presentation, then, the essay and the work of art resemble each other in that both link subject and object, on the one hand, and conceptual (logic-like, language-like) and aconceptual or nonidentical moments on the other hand. It is important to note that the cause of the tensions Adorno refers to exists both in the product-whether it be the work of art or a piece of con-

ceptual writing-and in what he calls the "adequate" or "genuine" experience of that product; his characterizations apply to aesthetic experience and the activity of thought or philosophizing as well as to the essay and the work of art. Aesthetic experience and thought are engaged in reconstructing or "imitating" (nachahmen) the kind of structure that exists in the object itself. The thinker, for instance, whose intellectual experience is the correlate of the essay, "does not think, but rather transforms himself into an arena of intellectual experience" (161); one does not understand a work of art until one is "inside its immanent motion," almost until "one recomposes it with one's ear in accord with its own logic, repaints it with one's eye, co-speaks it with the linguistic sensorium," Ador- no writes in the later essay "Voraussetzungen" (433; translated as "Presuppositions").

What becomes clear, then, is that for Adorno the conceptual and the aconceptual moments in both art and thought, while dis- tinguishable, are inseparably linked. One way in which Adorno conceives this linkage is as an inherent movement from art to thought and thought to art, an inner dynamic by which each is impelled toward the other. (It is no wonder, then, that we saw a


movement from the theoretical to the aesthetic dimension in Well- mer's critique of Aesthetic Theory.) The movement from aesthetic to

philosophical experience, Adorno says in Aesthetic Theory, is inherent in aesthetic experience itself: "Philosophy . . . is inherent in all aesthetic experience that is not barbaric, alien to art. Art awaits its own explication" (AT 524/484).4 This movement, he says elsewhere, is not one of antithesis; the work of art is understood

conceptually "in that the content grasped in the full activity (Voll- zug) of experiencing ... is reflected on and named. Works of art are understood in this way only through the philosophy of art, which, however, is not something external to the contemplation of them" ("Voraussetzungen" 433).

If the movement from the aesthetic to the philosophical is one of reflection, the movement in the opposite direction is an exercise of cunning: the essay, Adorno says in "Essay as Form," "cunningly . . . settles itself into texts, as though they were simply there and had authority" (167). The argument Adorno makes in connection with this statement would take us into the sphere of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and I will not pursue it. For my purposes, what is important here is the link Adorno makes with rhetoric. The essay, he says, is related to rhetoric, which was origi- nally opposed to scientific discipline. But in the essay the rhetorical moment of pleasure-giving communication with the audience is transformed into the subject's pleasurable interaction with the

object-thus the moment of the essay's aesthetic autonomy: "The

pleasures that rhetoric wants to provide to its audience are subli- mated in the essay into the idea of the pleasure of freedom vis- a-vis the object, freedom which gives the object more of itself than if it were mercilessly incorporated into the order of ideas" (168). In this way the essay remains faithful to the desire for happiness and the desire to achieve a peaceable relation with the nonidentical object.

This sublimation of communicative rhetoric consists in an aesthetic transformation of the linguistic substance of the essay. This is the essence of the essay's ruse; the essay "aims at appropri- ating for expressive language something that it forfeited under the domination of a discursive logic which cannot be circumvented but may be outwitted in its own form by the force of an

intruding subjective expression" (169). Adorno names the "objec-


tionable transitions in rhetoric," the features that normally constitute the persuasive aspect of communication that serves domination: "association, ambiguity of words, neglect of logical 'synthesis"' (169). Appropriated by the essay for its own purposes, these aconceptual rhetorical transitions are both the source of the

essay's affinity with the work of art (it is in this context that Ador- no refers to music's stringent but aconceptual transitions) and the means by which the configuration that constitutes the essay's truth content is established: the essay's "transitions disavow rigid deduction in the interest of establishing internal cross-connections... [The essay] uses equivocation to clarify what usually remains obscure to the critique of equivocation: whenever a word means a variety of things, the differences are not entirely distinct, for the unity of the word points to some unity, no matter how hidden, in the thing itself" (169). The conceptual configuration thus produced is ultimately compatible with logic: "the essence of [the essay's] content, not the manner of its presentation, is commen- surable with logical criteria" (170). Again, for Adorno this aesthetic ruse within the form of discursive logic does not constitute an antithesis to reason.

Adorno's presentation of the essay's configurational form takes us directly into his most fundamental concepts concerning the relationship between art and thought. But it is through the "aconceptual transitions" he specifies that we can begin to envision what "configurational form" will actually look like. Briefly, we may expect to find constellations in the sense of cross-connections formed by the interrelated and associated meanings of equivocal terms. With this in mind, I will proceed to an examination of one of Adorno's critical-aesthetic essays in the light of his characterization of configurational form.

Configurational Form in Adorno's Critical-Aesthetic Essays: "Titles"

The essay I have chosen, "Titles," from Noten zur Literatur III (325-34),5 consists of a number of segments, each one a single paragraph, separated by spaces (or asterisks, depending on the edition). We would expect the configurational form to hold both


for the essay as a whole and for each individual segment. Let me begin by providing a rough sketch of the configurational form of "Titles" as a whole.

As I noted earlier, Adorno stresses the element of contingen- cy and subjectivity in the essay form. That element is much in evidence in "Titles." The author's mind seems to move from one idea or one reminiscence of a work's title to another as he writes what seems to be a series of random reflections on titles, including both comments on specific book titles and comments on the process of finding a title for a book. Adorno begins with comments on Lessing's remarks On titles, moves to the difficulties an author experiences in titling his own book, then to reminiscences of his own publisher, Peter Suhrkamp, to anecdotes about how some of his own books got their titles, to comments on the titles of Kafka's novels, and so on. Only very occasionally is there any explicit transition from one segment to the next. The coherence across individual segments, then, must emerge from something other than an explicit discursive presentation with its familiar forms of transition, and the configurational form of the essay as a whole will result from relationships between the forces keeping the segments separate and the forces linking them together.

In some cases, associations provide links between one segment and the next. Peter Suhrkamp's aversion to titles with the word "and" in them, for instance, provides the link to the segment that follows, which explains how Adorno's book Prisms got its name: Suhrkamp rejected Adorno's original title, Cultural Crit- icism and Society, because it contained the word "and." Primarily, however, the segments are linked, though not in any clear sequential order, through the fact that each of them is connected in some way with some aspect of the link between titles and names and naming. The manifold meanings and conceptual ramifications of the word or concept "name" make for a whole spectrum of links between titles and names. The first segment of "Titles," for instance, begins with a proper name used as a title for a play (Nanine), occurring in. a passage from Lessing, and ends with the essential impossibility of naming (i.e., titling) contemporary works of art, with Adorno citing Beckett's title L'Innommable (The Unnam- able) as correctly indicating this aporia. What I will call here the

specific contingent or "concrete" entities presented in the essay-


individual events, titles, persons, and so on-provide occasions for reflections on one aspect or another of the title-name link. At the same time, however, those concrete elements include a group of modern authors-Beckett, Kafka, Kraus, Proust, Adorno himself-whose work is not merely an occasion for Adorno's reflection but itself already reflects on this link. (Adorno's essay on Kafka in Prisms, for instance, has as its motto a quotation from Proust: "If God the Father created things by naming them, it is by taking away their names or giving them others that the artist recreates them.") No synthetic statement of the complex of ideas

generated by, or constituting, the name-title link is provided in "Titles," although the individual segments do have recognizable endings as they have recognizable beginnings, and the first and last segments are clearly linked through their reference to Less-

ing. One might say, however, that there is an invisible center to the

essay "Titles"-one not named and present only negatively in several senses-namely, Walter Benjamin's concept of the true name, alluded to in Adorno's statement concluding one of the

segments: "The work no more knows its true title than the zaddik knows his mystical name" (327).

As a provisional formulation of the above, we might say that

configurational form in this essay consists of a grouping, in the form of a series partially linked by association, of (for the most

part) concrete entities,6 each of which illuminates one or more

aspects of what is essentially a conceptual issue, with the various interrelated but not identical aspects providing linkages between the presentations that go beyond mere juxtaposition in a series. At the same time, however, the terms in which the conceptual issue

appears can refer variously to concrete elements in the presentations and to concepts, and conversely the concrete elements in the

presentations themselves contain or embody reflections on aspects of the conceptual issue.

This formulation, which I will exemplify in what follows, points up the aspect of the configurational form that did not stand out clearly in Adorno's own comments in "Essay as Form," namely, the fact that both the "conceptual" and the "concrete" (or "aconceptual") elements in the essay are equivocal, in Adorno's term, or possessed of multiple interrelated meanings; and that equivocation crosses the boundaries between the conceptual and


the aconceptual, so that the configuration is full of linkages or movements between the conceptual and the concrete which are as various as the various aspects of the central issue itself. This com-

plex structuring of the relationship between the conceptual and the concrete is, I believe, the key to the aesthetic dimension in Adorno's critical-aesthetic essays. I will offer further comments on it after a detailed analysis of one of the individual segments from "Titles."

The segment I have chosen is the second of two segments on Kafka's titles. It is six sentences long and reads as follows:

For Kafka's America novel, the title he used in his diary, The One Who Was Never Heard of Again [Der Verschollene], would have been better than the title under which the book went down in history. That too is a fine title; for the work has as much to do with America as the prehistoric photograph "In New York Harbor" that is included as a loose page in my edition of the Stoker fragment of 1913. The novel takes place in an America that moved while the picture was being taken, the same and yet not the same America on which the emigrant seeks to rest his eye after a long, barren crossing.-But nothing would fit that better than The One Who Was Never Heard of Again, a blank space for a name that cannot be found. The perfect passive participle verschollen, "never heard of again," has lost its verb the way the family's memory loses the emigrant who goes to ruin and dies. Far beyond its actual meaning, the expression of the word verschollen is the expression of the novel itself. (330)7

As I stated earlier, the configurational process operates in the fine texture of the writing, within, between, and across sentences. It must do so if the rhetorical dimension in the essay is to "outwit," as Adorno says, the discursive logical form of expository writing which cannot be circumvented. Since discursive logic works at the level of sentences and sequences of sentences, that is the level, or one level, on which equivocation in the sense I have just discussed-reference to a variety of interrelated aspects of some-

thing, those aspects ranging across the conceptual/aconceptual boundary-is practiced. Accordingly, I will use a sentence-by- sentence analysis here to show equivocation and the creation of configurational form at work.


Sentence 1: "For Kafka's America novel, the title he used in his

diary, The One Who Was Never Heard of Again [Der Verschollene], would have been better than the title under which the book went down in history."

This sentence presents an aesthetic judgment: the "working title" of Kafka's book Amerika would have been better than its final title. By the conventions of discursive presentation, the rest of the

segment should present the grounds for this judgment; we shall see if, and how, it does. This first sentence also presents us with two concrete elements in the form of two specific names for an

existing book. (The reader also reflects, perhaps, that one name is

ostensibly that of a real place, America, in which the book is presumably set, while the other title presumably refers to a character in the book.) The sentence also refers in two different places to the thematic content of the essay "Titles" as a whole. Fairly obvi-

ously, it links up with the discussion in the preceding segment of Kafka's use of provisional titles and his unwillingness to give definitive titles to his own works. The other reference is more puzzling and less conspicuous: Amerika is the title under which Kafka's book "went down in," literally "entered into," history. One of the themes of the essay "Titles" is the relationship of the title to the book's afterlife, its fame; Adorno's phrase alludes to this theme and to the issue of Kafka's fame and the afterlife of his works. Further, although the reader probably assumes that the title The One Who Was Never Heard of Again refers to the novel's protagonist and that the phrase "went down in history" refers to the subse-

quent history of the book's reception, still the presence of these

phrases in the same sentence raises the question of the relation-

ship between fame and oblivion. And since the sentence seems to suggest these relationships, the reader easily makes the association to Adorno the emigrant in America and the relationship of Adorno the emigrant to Adorno the author.

Sentence 2: "That too is a fine title; for the work has as much to do with America as the prehistoric photograph 'In New York Harbor' that is included as a loose page in my edition of the Stoker fragment of 1913."

In terms of discursive logic, this sentence is a digression or a qualification. Rather than immediately giving the grounds for the


aesthetic judgment announced in the first sentence, it offers a second, subordinate judgment-the title Amerika is also a good title. And the semicolon leads the reader to expect that the

grounds for that second judgment will be offered in the second

part of the sentence. And indeed the second part of the sentence does begin with the word "for," indicating that reasons, or

grounds, are to follow. But what is then provided is a complex and

ambiguous analogy that introduces two new, though in some sense related, concrete elements. To paraphrase Adorno's analo-

gy: Kafka's book is related to the land or nation America as a certain real photograph is related to it; the degree of relationship in each case is that befitting a good title. This sentence blocks the

operation of discursive thought by leaving two crucial matters

unspecified: what is the relationship, and what degree of relation-

ship is fitting for a title? Certainly the comparison of a photograph and a book raises (though in a dubious context) the idea of

"photographic realism." But because the statement is so unspecified, other aspects of the sentence come to the fore and enter into

relationships with the previous sentence: the word "prehistoric" enters into relationship with "went down in history" of the previous sentence, and the presence of Adorno's personal copy of the Stoker fragment of 1913 (an early portion of Kafka's novel published before the novel as a whole) seems to echo the earlier title of the novel, while the conjunction of the word "prehistoric" and a

specific date, 1913, echoes the question of the relationship between history and oblivion raised in the first sentence.

Here let me note the disproportion between these two pages of commentary on these connections and their object, two sentences, approximately six printed lines, of Adorno's writing. This is only partially due to the fact that some of the elements in the sentences refer beyond themselves to the context of the essay "Titles" as a whole. In these two sentences Adorno has introduced two judgments, the incompletely specified criterion for one of the

judgments, along with the incompletely specified reasons for the

judgment, and approximately six of what I have been calling concrete elements: one book with two (or three) titles, a country with a harbor, a photograph, and a copy of an earlier version of the book. All of these concrete elements are linked through their

relationship either to the book or to its presumed subject matter.


Adorno has encouraged the reader, shall we say, to envision many linkages between these various elements and between them and the rest of the essay, but he himself has specified or defined no relationships (although he has alluded or referred to certain matters of fact, such as the fact that the Stoker was published in 1913).

Sentence 3: "The novel takes place in an America that moved while the picture was being taken, the same and yet not the same America on which the emigrant seeks to rest his eye after a long, barren crossing."

In terms of discursive logic, here we recognize the explanation for comparison of the novel and the photograph in the previous sentence. But the third thing to which both are being referred, America, is unstable in various senses, as Adorno indicates quite explicitly. While it is tempting to recast this sentence in com- monsense terms to mean that a photograph of America taken by an arriving emigrant from on board will be moving because the ship is moving, and while it is virtually inevitable that this resolution of the relationship among the terms in the sentence (novel, photograph, America, emigrant) occur to the reader, still this meaning of the sentence is only an initial and partial resolution; to take it as the final meaning of the sentence would be to obscure Adorno's elusive structure and to destroy the generative power of the sentence,8 which is contained in the precise relationship between the logical form and the elements that form employs. For here we are in fact told, syntactically speaking, only that the novel takes place (spielt, plays) in America, an America qualified in a variety of ways, which are the same and not the same as each other-the America of the novel, which encompasses more than the fictional New York Harbor with which the novel begins; a moving America in a picture, which is both the blurred shipboard snapshot taken by the immigrant and the distorted image of America captured in film, or motion pictures; and the emigrant's wishful image of America, also in motion in some sense, though he wishes his relation to it to be one of rest. Each of these ambigu- ously equated elements of the sentence is itself in motion in relation to one another; while logically the sentence seems to do no more than name a place in several ways, in fact it evokes movement and instability across its referents. The sentence in fact per-


mits no resolution of its elements. One is reminded of Adorno's evocation of Ravel's title "Une barque sur l'ocean" to express the fragmentation inherent in modern music;9 at the very least, the sentence demolishes any notion of the novel as photographic realism that may have been aroused by the previous sentence. At no level do Adorno's terms "hold still."

Sentence 4: "But nothing would fit that better than The One Who Was Never Heard of Again, a blank space for a name that cannot be found."

In terms of discursive logic, this sentence marks a return to the aesthetic judgment presented in the first sentence. It seems to tell us why Kafka's working title was in fact better, and in doing so

incorporates what we have been told about why the eventual title was also good: Kafka's working title is better because it fits "that" better, and the appositive Adorno provides for it-"a blank space for a name that cannot be found"-presumably indicates how it fits better. We have the form of discursive argumentation, then, but we do not have its conclusiveness. For far from explaining the reasons for the judgment, the sentence sets up still another com-

plex comparison that gives rise to unresolved speculation on the reader's part and thus functions as a question rather than a statement. The comparison might be formulated to read: how does a blank space for a name that cannot be found fit an America that moves while having its picture taken better than a prehistoric photograph that is and is not like the arriving emigrant's image of America? Even this formulation gives more specification to the terms of the comparison than Adorno does.

Here it is particularly evident that it is the use of a whole series of interrelated concrete elements (for a "blank space for a name that cannot be found" is also a concrete element in that it names something that appears within everyday reality) that turns the comparisons into picture puzzles, giving rise to a process of

speculation on the reader's part in an attempt to solve them. The discursive movement from sentence to sentence is thus accom-

panied by a movement from one concrete element to another, the

presences being linked both through syntactic or semantic indica- tions of relationship (similes, appositions, comparisons, etc.) and

through intrinsic or "objective" relationships (New York Harbor is


part of America, a book's title is related to the book, etc.) We can also see, incidentally, that there can be negativity built into what I have been calling concrete elements: a blank space can be found in reality, but it is blank, a name that cannot be found is a familiar absence; and so on.

Sentence 5: "The perfect passive participle verschollen, 'never heard of again,' has lost its verb the way the family's memory loses the emigrant who goes to ruin and dies."

Discursively, this sentence would seem to provide an explanation for what was so puzzling in the previous sentence. It provides an explicit analogy and links the emigrant with the working title

being discussed. It is easy to fill in the comparison by assuming that it is the emigrant's name that has been lost and therefore cannot be entered in the blank space that is the title. But strangely, this explanatory analogy uses as its terms new concrete elements related to but not identical with the previous ones. The title Der Verschollene is now considered in its grammatical form (the Ger- man word verschollen is a past participle to which there is no longer a corresponding main verb or infinitive), and the emigrant is now considered from the point of view of his family's memory. Once

again, rather than settling matters, these new terms provoke reflection: the perspective has been shifted from the emigrant's view of America to the memory of his family in the country he left behind, and rather than thinking of America as the land of the future we are reminded of the way things disappear into the past as history moves forward, like the lost main verb of which verschollen is the remnant. We are returned, then, to the complex of

speculations concerning history and prehistory, fame and oblivion, that were aroused several sentences earlier. Kafka's title The One Who Was Never Heard of Again is the complement of the Beck- ett title The Unnamable, presented earlier in Adorno's essay: there are blank spaces where names (or titles) once were, not only because it becomes impossible to name things in modern times but also because names have sunk into an archaic prehistory and been ruined there. (Here too we are reminded of the unnamed Walter Benjamin and his Klee painting Angelus Novus; Klee's practice of holding christening ceremonies for his paintings is mentioned in the segment on Kafka preceding the one I am discussing.)


Sentence 6: "Far beyond its actual meaning, the expression of the word verschollen is the expression of the novel itself."

This is the concluding sentence of the segment, and we read it as finally explaining the basis for the aesthetic judgment announced in the first sentence. It does in fact differ from the

previous sentences. It introduces no new concrete elements but instead a contrasting pair of concepts, expression (Ausdruck) and

meaning (Bedeutung). Using these concepts, it makes a statement that requires relatively little paraphrase or interpolation. It says that Kafka's working title Der Verschollene is better than the title Amerika because its expression-as opposed to its meaning-is the same as the expression of the novel itself. We are, then, to consider all that has gone before, the whole complex of associations and comparisons and analogies, as constituting the expression both of the title and of the novel. Meaning, in contrast, would be, in this context, the literal significance or reference of the word. (Adorno does not mention the fact that Amerika is the only one of Kafka's novels in which the protagonist actually does have a name rather than an initial, a fact surely more compatible with the expression rather than the literal significance of the title The One Who Was Never Heard of Again.)

With the move from concrete elements to concepts in this sentence, the discussion has moved to the level of aesthetic theory; the terms "expression" and "meaning" are terms in the philosophical discussion of the aesthetic. In terms of theory, this sentence

fairly straightforwardly indicates Adorno's criterion of a good title: one whose expression fits that of its work. While not defining the term "expression," the sentence also indicates that it consists of the kind of thing we saw in the previous sentences. But what we saw in the previous sentences consisted precisely of interrelations between concrete elements provoking but not resolving speculation on the reader's part. One might be tempted to say that the concrete elements themselves are the bearers of the expression peculiar to Kafka's novel, while the kinds of unresolvable inter-

relationships set up between them are the work of Adorno rather than Kafka, but that would not be accurate. "Expression" refers here both to the substance of Kafka's novel and to the substance of Adorno's discussion of it, because both relationships (such as in-

stability of reference or disappearance in prehistorical oblivion)


and concrete elements (such as names and images) refer as much to terms in Adorno's discussion as to elements in Kafka's book. If we are tempted to discount the intimacy of the concrete elements in Kafka's content with the expressive logic of Adorno's writing, we need only refer to the following sentence, which appears earlier in "Titles": "decent titles are the ones into which ideas immi-

grate and then disappear, having become unrecognizable." Just as Kafka's title expresses the novel, so the figure in the novel, as well as its title, serves as a figure for titles as such. In other words, the

expressiveness specific to Kafka's work is the same expressiveness that characterizes Adorno's writing here. The distinction between Kafka's work and Adorno's essay is that in the essay segment we follow the riddle-like configurations of concrete elements within a

sequential discursive pattern, and the riddle-like configurations and configurational process can eventually be named in conceptual terms like "expression." The critical-aesthetic essay demon- strates and names inter-references between work, title, and aesthetic theory by rearranging concrete elements in unresolved

relationships within a sentence logic conforming to a discursive

pattern. Let me recapitulate the nature of configurational form in

Adorno's critical-aesthetic essays on the basis of the above analysis. First, in the configurational form, a number of "concrete" elements from the aesthetic domain in general and the domain of the work discussed, which extends into the domain of everyday reality, are brought into the essay and placed in relationship with one another. The relationships produced may be of reference, resemblance, or kinship, and they may be invoked explicitly or created by the reader in his search for resolutions of the relationships explicitly mentioned. Second, something resembling the form of discursive argumentation is maintained throughout each segment of the essay, with sentences ostensibly fitting established functions of explanation, support, distinction, and so forth. For the most part, however, the actual substance of the sentences, the terms of the implied logical structure, is filled not with conceptual specification but with concrete elements, so that the relationships evoked by the apparent logical form of the sentences remain unspecified and, as previously stated, provoke reflection on the


reader's part. The sentences might thus be said to have "logicity" rather than explicit logic. Their lack of specification or resolution provokes reflection that extends beyond the immediate context and freely draws concrete elements from elsewhere into the process of creating and reflecting on relationships. There is a freedom and lack of restriction in this reflective process that resembles the free play of the subject's faculties in Kant's definition of aesthetic experience.

Third, this mass of reflection-provoking configurations of concrete elements is ultimately drawn back within the discursive form as a conceptual conclusion is drawn on the basis of it. This conclusion, however, is not grounded through explicit argument using discursive logic; rather, its grounds are embodied in the configurational mass, the whole of which forms a presentation or demonstration of the conclusion rather than an argument for it. Since the concepts and conclusions involved are terms in aesthetic

theory, they have in any case as their referents concrete aesthetic elements such as titles. Hence one might say that this type of demonstration is appropriate to them.

Let me note that nothing in this formulation contradicts what Adorno says about the essay and its relationship to discursive

logic in "The Essay as Form." The above discussion does bring out, however, the importance of the concrete elements in the text, the reader's continued configurational reflections, and the discursive pattern or shell in relation to which the reflective process occurs.

Configurational Form in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory

The configurational form we have just described in the essay "Titles" is aesthetic in its use of an aconceptual "logicity" that

provokes but does not resolve reflection. In tying that reflection to a discursive pattern and to a conceptual conclusion, the con-

figurational form sustains a movement between the aesthetic and the philosophical dimensions of the writing. The reader's experience is one of expansive reflection returning to the concrete but

eventually also to the conceptual conclusion; the reflection ex-


tends outward but is still contained. What is achieved is a sense of aesthetic richness-the pleasurable free play of subjective faculties-with conceptual import, in the space of six sentences.

To what extent is the form of Aesthetic Theory-certainly not an essay in the literal sense-characterized by configurational form as Adorno has described it in "The Essay as Form" and as we have seen it in "Titles"? It is interesting to note that whereas Wellmer conceived Aesthetic Theory as merely making more conspicuous (his word is hervorkehren) a rigidity and artificiality that thus presumably characterized the earlier texts as well, Adorno himself considered Aesthetic Theory different in form from his earlier writings. The difference, he thought, was occasioned by its content, aesthetic theory, and it surprised him. As he says in a letter written during work on Aesthetic Theory,

It is interesting that, in working, consequences for the form are forced upon me by the content of the thoughts, consequences I had long expected but which nonetheless now sur- prise me. What is happening is quite simply that from my theorem that there is nothing that has "primacy" philosophically it now follows as well that one cannot construct an argumentative context in the customary sequence of stages; instead, one must assemble the whole from a series of part- complexes that are of equal weight, so to speak, and arranged concentrically, on the same level; the idea must result from their constellation, not their sequence. (AT 541/496)

Clearly the kind of form described here at least resembles the

descriptions of constellational form in "The Essay as Form," as in the typical formulation quoted earlier: "In the essay, discretely separated elements enter into a readable context; it erects no scaffolding, no edifice. Through their own movements, the elements crystallize into a configuration" (161).

Still, Adorno's description of the form of Aesthetic Theory does introduce some new terms: weight, level, concentricity, "part- complexes." To what extent can they be shown to refer to identi- fiable differences in form that would differentiate the form of Aesthetic Theory from that of the critical-aesthetic essays? Without going into the kind of detailed sentence-by-sentence analysis I did with "Titles," I will begin investigating this question by examining


a portion of one of the many very long "paragraphs" that make

up, in groups, the part-complexes of Aesthetic Theory. Here is the beginning of a paragraph that initiates a group of several paragraphs on the concept of natural beauty (das Naturschine):

Since Schelling, whose aesthetics is called philosophy of art, aesthetic interest has concentrated on works of art. Natural beauty, to which the most penetrating definitions of the Cri- tique of Judgment were directed, is hardly thematic for theory any more. Scarcely, however, because, as Hegel would have it, it has actually been sublated to something higher; it was repressed. The concept of natural beauty touches a wound, and one comes close to thinking of it in connection with the violence that the work of art, pure artifact, does to the quasi- natural. Completely and wholly made by man, it [the work of art as artifact] is opposed to what has seemingly not been made: nature. But as the pure antithesis of one another, they are dependent on one another: nature is dependent on the experience of a mediated, objectified world, and the work of art is dependent on nature, the mediated representation of immediacy. This is why it is incumbent upon the theory of art to reflect on natural beauty. (AT 97-98/91)

We recognize in this passage certain features that characterized the passage from "Titles" examined earlier. First, there is a discursive pattern in which each sentence can be construed as fulfilling a function in an expository argumentative sequence, but where the links are never fully spelled out. Here, the first two sentences attest to the transition through which the concept of natural beau-

ty disappears from the philosophy of art, and the third suggests the reason-that concept was repressed. The fourth seems to

explicate the reason for the repression, and the fifth and sixth to

explicate the notion of violence. The seventh sentence then makes an assertion the grounds for which are seen to consist in what has

gone before. Second, there is the pattern of adding new elements through

opposition and comparison or contrast. Thus in the first three sentences it is not only asserted that the concept of natural beauty has been suppressed in aesthetics, but a complex relationship among the three figures Kant, Schelling, and Hegel is also set up.


The concept of the work of art as artifact is introduced in sentence 4, and in sentence 5 this concept, in a different verbal form (Gemachtes, something made), appears in the main statement. In sentence 6 a new conceptual pair, mediatedness and immediacy, is introduced through linkage to the previous opposition of nature and artifact. To some extent, then, we see the same pattern we saw in the segment from "Titles": a discursive movement that is not fully resolved as it proceeds, and an interlocking series of elements introduced in the course of that movement.

At the same time, there are striking differences between this text from Aesthetic Theory and the segment from "Titles." The concrete elements here are impoverished, and the inter-reference of concrete and abstract is weak. (At this point the reader may object, with some grounds, that the segment from "Titles" is particularly rich in concrete elements and that there is much in the critical-aesthetic essays that resembles the writing in Aesthetic Theo- ry. I think one would have to agree, however, that the segment from "Titles" could not appear in Aesthetic Theory, and this fact points to a crucial difference.) As concrete elements we have the names Kant, Schelling, and Hegel, but the reference is immediately to the conceptual terms of their theories. We have in the connection of "wound" and "violence" something closer to the sort of thing we saw in "Titles"; although, as we shall see, Adorno does play on this theme, it finds too little resonance in the immediate context to bring a rich concrete dimension into play. The reflections engendered in the reader by the sentences in his/her effort to fit the content of the sentences with the discursive function allotted to them thus do not, for the most part, span different kinds of concreteness and do not connect the concrete with the abstract. In this sense, Adorno's statement that the part-complexes in Aesthetic Theory are of equal weight and on the same level holds at the level of individual sentences in sequence as well. The elements within the paragraph and the individual sentence are (largely, again) of equal weight and on the same level in that they do not move from one type of concreteness to another and do not utilize the equivocation between the conceptual and the aconceptual. In this way the mass of concepts presented is not subjected to the same kind of aesthetic demonstration as were those in the critical-aesthetic essays. Here the ideas have no longer "cunningly


settled into texts"-at least, texts other than that of Aesthetic Theory itself-so that allusion to texts can no longer bring concrete elements, and through them the aesthetic dimension, into the writing. There is, to be sure, a pattern of commentary on other philosophical works, especially those of Kant and Hegel, and there is an abundance of references to individual artists, artworks, and art movements, but the references to philosophical works remain conceptual and the individual works of art mentioned function more as examples than as cultural objects to be opened up in the essay mode.

Without this aesthetic dimension, the kind of expansive but contained aesthetic-reflective experience elicited by the critical- aesthetic essays is missing for the reader. In its absence, the inter-

linking series of conceptual oppositions in Adorno's writing makes possible, and in fact requires, a different kind of activity on the part of the reader. When this activity is not forthcoming, the text can produce the sense of a repetitious surface without depth that I described at the beginning of this essay: the concepts can

appear not as members of configurations or constellations but as points on a geometrical (rather than an aesthetic) surface, all

forming part of the same plane. This would be less of a danger in a straightforward theoretical presentation with its sense of forward movement advancing toward a conclusion through relation-

ships of deduction, inference, or exemplification. The relative absence of concrete elements in Aesthetic Theory

is, of course, related to the book's project. Its subject matter is not individual cultural artifacts but aesthetic theory. This does not mean, however, that Aesthetic Theory presents a theory of aesthetics (which is why it is inappropriate to categorize or classify Aesthetic

Theory as a particular type of aesthetics). Rather, it remains cri-

tique in that its subject matter is previous aesthetic theories, which it criticizes. The stuff of Aesthetic Theory is concepts-and in fact individual concepts rather than lines of argument-from other theories, Kant's and Hegel's chief among them, and the con-

figurations in Aesthetic Theory are composed of concepts (classi- cism, modernity, the whole and the parts, aesthetic contemplation, and so on).

But there is more to it than that. If philosophy and art neces-

sarily imply one another for Adorno, this is true for a critique of


aesthetic concepts as well. Traditional aesthetic categories, Adorno says, can neither be retained as sacrosanct nor simply discarded in favor of unreflected subjective experience. Neither traditional con-

cepts nor immediate subjective experience can provide an unmedi- ated and definitive source of aesthetic understanding. Knowledge results from their confrontation: "Art awaits its own explication. Methodologically, this is accomplished through the confrontation of historically transmitted categories and moments of aesthetic the-

ory with artistic experience; they reciprocally correct one another" (AT 524/484). In Aesthetic Theory "artistic experience" may mean

experience with individual works of art, but that experience has been mediated through reflection on the historical development of art to the present, including reflection on the self-understanding of the arts. Accordingly, the concepts with which Aesthetic Theory is concerned are not drawn solely from the realm of aesthetics or the philosophy of art. They are also drawn from the realm of artistic practice as reflected in terms of historical experience. Consider this passage on the work of art as a tour de force, for instance:

Every artifact works against itself. Works that are designed as tours de force, balancing acts, reveal something that goes beyond all artifice: the realization of the impossible. In actuality, the impossibility of any and every work of art makes even the simplest work of art a tour de force. Hegel's denunciation of the virtuoso element-although he was enchanted with Rossini, a denigration that lives on in the resentment directed against Picasso-is in secret complicity with the affirmative ideology that glosses over the antinomic character of art and all its products. Works that have succumbed to affirmative ideology are almost always oriented to the notion that great art must be simple, a notion that is challenged by the tour de force. By no means the worst criterion for judging the fruit- fulness of aesthetic-technical analysis would be that it lays bare the means by which a work becomes a tour de force. (AT 162/156)

Adorno's point here is that the work of art is attempting the impossible in attempting to achieve a pacified unity of conflicting elements, an impossibility which is openly displayed in the risk, daring, and exertion inherent in virtuoso pieces; this impossibility


reveals the falseness of the idea that art should be simple (and spontaneous). For our purposes, what is important is that the tour de force and its associated concept of virtuosity derive from the realm of artistic practice rather than directly from the realm of

philosophical aesthetics. It is only from a historical standpoint that has seen the dialectic of virtuosity and open form in the works of individual artists and art movements, however, that the notion of the tour de force can be mediated with the aesthetic-philosophical concept of simplicity (and with the notion of the classic, Adorno's

critique of which echoes in the background here). The experien- tially mediated aesthetic analysis necessary to such historical reflection is represented only tangentially in Aesthetic Theory, as when Adorno compares the work of Beethoven, master of the tour de force, with Hegel's logic: "One could demonstrate the paradoxical nature of the tour de force with equal stringency in the work of Beethoven: out of nothing comes something; the aesthetic-bodily proving of the first steps of Hegel's logic" (AT 163/156). This reference to Beethoven's work is not itself a substantiation of Adorno's idea but only a hint, an appeal to a possible demonstration outside Aesthetic Theory itself. The absence of concrete elements in Aesthetic Theory, then, does not mean an absence of aesthetic experience altogether; aesthetic experience has gone into making up the complex standpoint from which notions from traditional philosophical aesthetics are confronted with the results of

historically reflected aesthetic experience. I will discuss the im-

plications of this shift from the procedure of the critical-aesthetic

essays shortly. To return for a moment to the continuities between the

critical-aesthetic essays and Aesthetic Theory: cross-referencing, through the use of equivocal terms in a variety of interrelated contexts, is as crucial to the configurational form of Aesthetic Theo-

ry as it is to the form of the essays. Adorno's critique of traditional aesthetic concepts is accomplished configurationally, as concepts figure first in one conceptual opposition and then in another. No

concept is related solely to one opposite concept, and no complex of interrelated concepts stands alone. As Adorno says in "The

Essay as Form," "concepts do not build a continuum of opera- tions, . . . rather the aspects of the argument interweave as in a

carpet" (160). This holds true both within and across passages in


Aesthetic Theory. The notion of the work of art as artifact, for instance, with which the passage on natural beauty was concerned, is also implicit in the notion of the work of art as a tour de force, something produced through intense effort and requiring ar- duous training to execute. The theme of wounding and violence, so understated in the passage on natural beauty, is present in a different but related sense in the mere idea of a tour deforce. In the tour de force, the violence necessary to produce an illusion of wholeness, simplicity, or unity in the diverse parts becomes evident. But the same issue of the relation of parts to whole will appear in another context, where the emphasis shifts to the historical mortality of works of art (and thus to their ambiguous relation to natural beauty):

It is essentially in the relationship between the whole and the parts that the work of art is processual .... Even in its objecti- vated form, the work of art remains, by virtue of the ten- dencies at work within it, something in the process of producing itself... . If, by virtue of the processual character peculiar to them, works of art live within history, then they can also perish within history.... If what reified consciousness thinks of as people's attitudes toward works of art changes in accor- dance with the historical situation, it is by no means only along with such attitudes that works of art change. Change of that kind is external in relation to the change that takes place within the works themselves: the falling away of one of their layers after another ... ; the determination of this change by their law of form as it emerges and, in doing so, detaches itself from the works; the hardening of works grown transparent, their aging, their falling silent. In the end, the unfolding of works of art is one with their decomposition. (AT 266/255)

If earlier we saw the work as tour de force, here we see works in what could be considered an analogy to natural objects aging and dying through the activity of forces at work within them. What we may extrapolate from the text as Adorno's own historical perspective, a perspective that allows him to critique a whole spectrum of works of art and philosophies of art, appears here as a historical dynamic within the work itself, as distinguished from a historically induced change in the standpoint of the observer.


This structure of overlapping conceptual contexts makes different demands on the reader of Aesthetic Theory than on the reader of the critical-aesthetic essays. Another letter in which Adorno formulates what is new about the form of Aesthetic Theory indicates that the loss of sequential arrangement is crucial; the "presentational difficulties" of Aesthetic Theory, he writes,

consist in the fact that the sequence of first and afterwards which is almost indispensable to a book proves to be so incom- patible with the matter itself that an arrangement (disposi- tion) in the traditional sense, something I have continued to follow until now (and followed even in Negative Dialectics) has proved to be not practicable. The book must be written concentrically, as it were, in paratactical parts of equal weight arranged around a center which they then express through their constellation. (AT 541/496)

While individual paragraphs in Aesthetic Theory seem to have beginnings and endings, the book as a whole has neither beginning nor ending, nor do the larger "part-complexes" in it. Whereas in the critical-aesthetic essays the reader has a number of means of orientation-the sense of the essay beginning and ending and having its own aesthetic autonomy; the texts or cultural artifacts discussed, despite the fact that their authority is in some sense illusory, the product of the essay's cunning; and the con-

cepts to which the mass of concrete aesthetic demonstration is ultimately tied-these sources of orientation are largely absent from Aesthetic Theory. Without boundaries (or groundings), the "center" which the textual configuration "expresses," as Adorno says in the letter quoted above, becomes the only source of orientation. The reader himself must create it through his intellectual

process, which configurates the shifting contexts he encounters. Thus, while Adorno says in "Essay as Form" that the essay "must pay for its affinity with open intellectual experience by the lack of security, a lack which the norm of established thought fears like death" (161), this lack of security is intensified in Aesthetic Theory. Reading from sentence to sentence, the reader's orientation is interrupted not only through shifts from one conceptual opposition to another but through the intermingling of historical-artistic and philosophical references. In the passages from Aesthetic Theory


presented earlier, for instance, Hegel appears at one point as the proponent of a philosophical notion of semblance, at another as an individual whose musical preferences contradict his statements on virtuosity, and at a third as a thinker who performs a tour de force in the theoretical realm analogous to Beethoven's in music. The question then becomes, from what standpoint can the reader interrelate the various conceptual contexts and shifting historical and philosophical perspectives to form the constellation whose "center" is implied but not directly represented? If adequate experience on the reader's part, that is, requires an "imitation" of the structure of the work, then the reader must construct the standpoint from which the content of Aesthetic Theory makes sense. How is that to occur? With great difficulty, must be the provisional answer, and not without a transformation of the reader's subjective capacities.

Three observations are relevant here. First, despite Adorno's affinities with certain traditions of thought, this standpoint cannot be one narrowly within any specific tradition of philosophical aesthetics, for all traditions are in principle subject to the kind of critique made from this standpoint. In this light, attempts to classify Aesthetic Theory as an aesthetic theory represent attempts to regain conceptual equilibrium from within a single theoretical perspective, and they will prove inadequate. Second, the term "standpoint" itself may be misleading here, since it implies a fixed point of reference, or a fixed ground from which matters are viewed. In Aesthetic Theory, however, even more than in the critical- aesthetic essays, it is precisely the ability to maintain, or continually to reestablish, equilibrium within shifting contexts that is required if one is not to succumb to disorientation. This ability might be conceptualized along the lines taken by Wellmer and some of his students, who talk about art's having potentials for the expansion and transformation of subjective capacities, or Haber- mas, who talks (following Piaget) about a "decentered" subjectivity and a developmental logic in which a postconventional dissolution of conventional norms may be followed by reconstitution on a different basis.10 Third, Aesthetic Theory is not written from the point of view of a contingent individual experiencing subject in the same way that the critical-aesthetic essays are. Because it does not contain the aesthetic dimension but rather presupposes it in


historically mediated form, it implies a certain historical situated- ness of perspective rather than a certain contingent subjectivity. The book does not so much promote aesthetic experience as require that the reader bring that experience to it from the outside in order to make sense of the book's assertions. There is indeed, for instance, a sense in which one can experience Beethoven's music as creating something out of nothing (to me, most easily in the variation movements in the late piano sonatas), but Adorno's statement to that effect makes sense only in the light of specific "adequate" experience on the reader's part, as Adorno indicates when he says at another point, "If one listens to, or reads, Beethoven's most extremely articulated music closely enough, it resembles a continuum of nothingness" (AT 276/265). Attempts to read the Aesthetic Theory as though it were one of Adorno's critical- aesthetic essays, then, will also fail, because one will not find the same sense of subjective free play and aesthetic pleasure.

In this sense it is indeed appropriate to draw a comparison between Aesthetic Theory as a late work and Adorno's analyses of the dialectic of subjectivity in Beethoven's late works, the analyses in "Spatstil Beethovens" ("Beethoven's Late Style") and "Verfrem- detes Hauptwerk. Zur Missa Solemnis" ("Alienated Masterwork: On the Missa Solemnis"). 1 Subjectivity and objectivity draw farther apart in those late works, Adorno says. As subjectivity withdraws from the works themselves, leaving them fragments, it remains the light that illuminates them. In Aesthetic Theory the subjectivity that has withdrawn is that of direct aesthetic experience,12 the kind of genuine aesthetic experience Adorno describes and tries to further elsewhere. Insofar as that kind of experience is neces-

sary to the ability to maintain or continually reestablish equilibrium in the shifting contexts of Aesthetic Theory, it is crucial not

only in establishing the center of Aesthetic Theory's constellation but also in experiencing a depth below its surface. The reader needs to be able not only to reweave the surface of the text across its

passages but also to re-atomize the text and test its assertions in the depth-light of aesthetic experience. To use another analogy in an attempt to connect Adorno's image of the constellation with this notion of surface and depth, the difference between the critical-aesthetic essays and Aesthetic Theory is like the evolution from Impressionism,13 where local fragmentation of color coex-


ists with the maintenance of a depth perspective, past pointillism, to Monet's late paintings, the water lily series, where both water and sky are presented in a repetitive but variegated surface, which is experienced in its expansiveness and its depth only through the work of the viewer's own atomized but expanded subjectivity.

Notes

1. This picture is beginning to change. See, for instance, Jameson's extremely astute Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic, in which Aesthetic Theory figures prominently.

2. Some of the initial groundwork for exploring this larger question is provided by Jameson, "T. W. Adorno, or Historical Tropes."

3. Adorno's conception of the essay form and the constellation are indebted both to earlier development of the essay form in German letters and to Ben- jamin's conceptions of constellational and paratactic form. Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music, for instance, begins by quoting Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama on configuration, and the "Essay as Form" makes early reference to Lukacs's "On the Nature and Form of the Essay," in his Soul and Form. See Kauffman, "The Skewed Path: Essaying as Un-Methodical Method."

4. All citations from Aesthetische TheorielAesthetic Theory appear in my own translation. For reference, page references are provided in the text following citations from this work, giving first the German and then the English references and using the abbreviation AT.

5. Page references to further citations from this text are to this edition. Trans- lations are my own.

6. The issues raised by the use of the term "concrete elements" are usefully explored in the philosophical analysis of referentiality. See Scheffler, Beyond the Letter: A Philosophical Inquiry into Ambiguity, Vagueness, and Metaphor in Language.

7. The German original reads as follows: "Fur den Amerika-Roman ware der Titel Der Verschollene, den Kafka im Tagebuch benutzte, besser gewesen als der, unter dem das Buch in die Geschichte einging. Schon ist auch dieser: weil das Werk soviel mit Amerika zu tun hat wie die prahistorische photographie Im Hafen von New York, die als loses Blatt in meiner Ausgabe des Heizer- Fragments von 1913 liegt. Der Roman spielt in einem verwackelten Amerika, demselben und doch nicht demselben wie das, an dem nach langer, oder iiber- fahrt das Auge des Emigranten Halt sucht.-Dazu aber passte nichts besser als Der Verschollene, Leerstelle eines unauffindbaren Namens. Diesem participium perfecti passivi kam sein Verb abhanden wie dem Andenken der Familie der Ausgewanderte, der gestorben und verdorben ist. Der Ausdruck des Wortes verschollen, weit uber seine Bedeutung hinaus, ist der des Romans selber."

8. Russell Berman's comment on this passage (in a letter to me) illustrates the generative effect of Adorno's compaction of allusive reference: "I take [the reference in the third sentence] to refer to the illusion that the shore is moving while it is in fact the position of the emigrant's ship that is constantly shifting. But it is also the objective dynamism of a society that will certainly not offer the emigrant anything like rest, except in the sense of a final resting-place. And that intimated


death-threat-ergo, der Verschollene-flows into a second material: the emigrant, trying to take a snapshot of the momentous arrival in the New World, wants to make the landscape hold still, but America, it turns out, is a moving picture. So it's also about a conflict between photography and film, between a late version of the iconography of bourgeois identity and the terror of the culture industry, the bad non-identity of the same and yet not the same America. From Benjamin we know about nineteenth century photography and a cult of the dead (and distant!). So the effort to record the instant of the rite of passage in the arriving emigrant's life is already implicated in death."

9. See Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 105. 10. See Habermas's reconstruction of Kohlberg's work on moral development

in "Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln," or the English translation, "Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action."

11. Both appear in Adorno, Moments Musicaux, now also Gesammelte Schriften 17. A translation of the Missa Solemnis essay appeared as "Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis."

12. As David Wittenberg pointed out to me in conversation, Lenhardt's translation of Aesthetic Theory is misleading in this respect; it interpolates a dimension of references to the individual artist and his subjective intentions and desires that is absent from Adorno's text.

13. I am indebted to Arden H. Nicholsen for this analogy.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetische Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Christian Lenhardt. London: Routledge and Keg-

an Paul, 1983. "Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis." Trans. Duncan Smith. Telos

28 (Summer 1961): 113-24. ."Der Essay als Form." Noten zur Literatur. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981. 9-

33. "The Essay as Form." Trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will. New

German Critique 32 (Spring-Summer 1984): 151-71. . Moments Musicaux. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1964. 13-17 and 167-85. . Philosophy of Modern Music. New York: Seabury, 1973.

"Voraussetzungen." Noten zur Literatur. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981. 136-45.

Habermas, Jiirgen. "Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln." Moral- bewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983. 127-206.

."Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action." Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nich- olsen. Cambridge: MIT, 1990. 116-194.

Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 1990.

."T. W. Adorno, or Historical Tropes." Marxism as Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. 3-59.

Kauffman, R. Lane. "The Skewed Path: Essaying as Un-Methodical Method." Diogenes 143 (Fall 1988): 66-92.


Scheffler, Israel. Beyond the Letter: A Philosophical Inquiry into Ambiguity, Vagueness, and Metaphor in Language. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.

Wellmer, Albrecht. "Wahrheit, Schein, Versohnung. Adorno's asthetische Ret- tung der Modernitat." Adorno-Konferenz 1983. Ed. Ludwig von Friedeburg and Jiirgen Habermas. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983. 138-76.

. "Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation: Adorno's Aesthetic Redemption of Modernity." Trans. Maeve Cook. Telos 62 (Winter 1984-85): 3-59.

Documents

Form in Adorno